The Green of Scrying
by LucasTRain98
Summary: A portrait of Flemeth in the aftermath of Trespasser and her unique relationship with the world.


It was quiet. It was always far too quiet here. Flemeth stood at the altar in the wilderness, listening to the wind, trying to distinguish between the sounds it made in the grass and the leaves and the branches. It was peaceful, but nonetheless…

She approached the altar surface, her bare feet making a muffled padding sound on the stone that broke the grass. As always, the stone knife and bowl sat there, taunting her, daring her to come to her last resort. Someone had also left some cut flowers on the surface in the recent past. They looked maybe two days wilted.

 _"_ _Wolfsbane"_ , she thought, _"how ironic."_

She didn't really want to do it. She hadn't slept much the night before, and she was surprisingly hungry. She wanted nothing more than to return to her camp, have a bit of the ram she had caught yesterday, and rest in the shade of the magnificent trees that filled the Arbor Wilds. The ceremonial crown she was forced to wear dug into her temples, and she felt a serious headache in the works. She was tired, uncomfortable, and irritable.

But none of this had anything to do with why she didn't want to go through with it. She had accomplished far greater feats in far worse conditions. She was _scared_. For the first time in a very long while she was actually and legitimately afraid, and she loathed the thought of confronting that. She hated the thought that she still had so much to do, so much to overcome. She hated the thought that, after all her years of strength and power, of lies and deceit, that she could even she could still feel fear. But, at the same time, she was no novice, she knew. She was nothing if not strong, and silently refused to be bested. Thus, she raised her arms to the effigy.

For a moment, she felt nothing. Then, it was there, as it always was. The power that she had come to know so intimately. It danced around the altar for a moment, swirling, darting, biting, before it struck at her. She felt her breath leave her body, and her vision tunneled. She dove upward into the deep sky, the beautiful blue shifting into a revolting mucus green. The dark mist followed. A fine, black fog flowed in from behind her, shifting and churning, partially obscuring the green of nothing.

Slowly, lazily, as if deciding which whim it felt like acting upon in that moment, it began to take shape. The fog assembled itself. First came…a person. It was a woman, standing, counting coins out in her hand. She finished, satisfied, and brought the hand with the coins forward, as if offering them to someone. The fog materialized another hand under hers which accepted the money, and then, as if it had finally made up its mind, spread from there. It ran up the arm of the second person to reveal a man, then a counter between the two, a stall, a street, a market, a city, a sky.

Flemeth looked around, uninterested in the various people milling about. She looked instead at the buildings. She looked at the architecture, the layout of the streets, and especially at the jet black dragon statues the towered over every corner and alley. She had only been here once before, a long time ago, but she recognized it almost immediately. She was in Minrathous.

 _"_ _Tevinter"_ , she thought, _"that's fine, but I already knew that."_

As if by command, the world swam before her eyes. Then, the elements of reality that seemed most concrete, the people, the statues, the sky, sublimated, piece by piece, dissolving back into the dark mist against the sickly green void. The fog churned again, deciding. Then it shifted with purpose, and this time materialized under her feet. Grass, most of it dead, began to stretch outward in all directions for miles, only interrupted by the occasional outcropping of rock. She turned, and found what she had been brought to see.

To her right, there was a river, next to which sat an Aravel. She could see the halla at the water, and the elves in camp, but she couldn't make out any detail. She needed to move closer. The world obliged, and the Dalish camp swam forward to meet her.

She was brought before a young elven man who was sitting on a rock, fletching an arrow and absently chatting with one of his contemporaries. She ignored what they said, instead paying attention to the way he was sitting, the pitch of his hands as he brought the knife across the feather, the particular pattern of the Vallaslin on his face. She stood there for sometime, studying him, before the man and his companion finally looked up. He stared directly at her face, and she was startled before she turned and saw that another, older elf had approached the two from directly behind her. She turned around again just in time to look into the young elf's eye once more before he stood, arrow in hand, and passed through her, following after his leader.

She watched the three elves leave for a moment before the world decided she was done here. It blurred and burst into a black cloud again. Again, it churned and swirled, considering the possibilities, and then took a decided shape. This time, the stone halls of Orzammar were brought before her. She was in one of the alleys, dwarf houses lining the walls of the sculpted cavern. This time, the only two figures present were a dwarf woman arguing with a man who appeared to be her brother. They both had the same sharp, wide nose and high set cheekbones, and they looked to be about the same age. The brother was belligerently angry about…something (Flemeth really didn't care), and the woman was listening to his abuse with a stalwart face. He finished whatever tirade he was on and allowed her a response, which was apparently unsatisfactory as he immediately began talking over her again. This time, however, she did not back down. She continued to say her piece, visibly struggling to keep her anger in check, before her brother evidently decided he had had enough and stormed into one of the houses, slamming the door as hard as one can slam a door made of stone. The dwarf woman simply stood, looking tired, eyes closed, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index finger. Flemeth could see that she was thinking of leaving.

 _"_ _Maybe"_ , she thought, unconvinced.

The world blurred and dissolved, but this time it did not take time making up its mind. The black fog simply withdrew quickly behind her, out of sight, and the green shifted back to the blue of the sky.

She blinked, then slowly lowered her arms. She stood a moment, feeling the stiffness in her shoulders. Unsatisfied and a bit ill-at-ease, she turned away from the altar and padded slowly into the grass. She stopped near the center of the clearing, listening again to the wind in the trees and the grass. How it whistled around the rocks and howled through the rushes. She was stalling and she knew it. It hurt. Even for her, it hurt. But the pain had to be irrelevant. Time was not a luxury she had, despite the peace of her surroundings. Steeling herself, she turned, strode confidently back to the altar, and leapt back into the green sky with black thunderheads.

She was taken this time to the White Spire in Orlais. She found herself in a classroom, young mages being taught to control and grow their abilities. She expected to find a student of interest, but instead, her focus was dawn to the teacher. He was human, and older than the last two. Not elderly, but clearly more experienced. More _tempered_. What struck her about him was not his features, or the way the veil seemed to ease a bit around him, as if relaxed by his presence. It was the way that he looked at his students. They way that he taught to them, not at them. They way that he spoke to each of them differently, locking eyes in a unique way with each individual, as if he held a personal relationship with every young mage in the room.

 _"_ _He lacks the will."_

 _"_ _Never underestimate the will of the good-hearted"_ , she argued with herself.

 _"_ _There is no goodness in the hearts of men."_

 _"_ _It is foolishness to dismiss anyone outright."_

The scene dissolved and the process repeated again and again. She was made to see many: A guard from Starkhaven, an Orlesian chevalier, a Ferelden woods-woman, a Rivaini fisherman for Andraste's sake.

She came to a bakery in Par Vollen, where the baker and another Qunari man were discussing their strange, dogmatic politics. Flemeth did not find much worth noting aside from the fact that their horns almost brushed the roof as they moved their heads.

 _"_ _One would think they would make their ceilings higher."_ , she mused.

The world fell away and she was back in the wilderness, arms stiff and head throbbing. She lowered her arms just as she was struck be the exhaustion of her effort. It came in a head-rush that blackened her vision and threatened to force her to collapse. She caught herself on the stone table before slowly lowering herself to sit on the steps of the altar and let it pass. As her sight returned, she found herself staring at the ground. She stared for a long while, this time uninterested in the wind. She was lost in her thoughts.

It had been so much easier last time. A Grey Warden recruit, fresh from his clan in the Brecilian Forest, a Ferelden family of apostates, a circle mage, a rebel at the time, from Ostwick. They had all come before her, one after another, detailing their potential. They had spread their possibilities out in front of her, each one a detailed map of things that may or may not have come to pass.

Now, however, she was lost. Nothing would reveal itself, and the world seemed more obscure to her than it had in decades (which she suspected was at least partly on behalf of his return). She simply didn't know. She felt old.

At times, her power exhilarated her. She had outlived all of her enemies (almost all), had mastered powers that others would never even know were possible. The rush of feeling her magic thrill in the pit of her stomach, allowing it to fill her, running down the back of her legs to the soles of her feet and up her spine to the center of her chest and the insides of her shoulders, then releasing it, allowing it to cascade out into the world, rolling, running, blending, changing the very face of reality to her will. It was a feeling unlike any other in existence, and she had experienced it on a level unlike any other. At times, she felt brilliant, strong, unstoppable…

But at other times, she just felt old. _"Far too old"_ , she often thought. Her joints creaked. Her neck and back ached. Her hair had long since become brittle and ragged. Arthritis occasionally made spell casting difficult. Arthritis! Making it difficult for the greatest witch of an era to ply her craft! She had seen so many summers come and go, so many men and daughters. She was growing tired, and it was frustrating that she had to go on. This was not how events were supposed to have played out. She should be allowed rest. Far too old.

 _"_ _I will see her avenged!"_

Her own words echoed back to her out of somewhere in her memory, though she half thought that they had been spoken aloud in her ear. It had long since become nearly impossible to tell which thoughts were truly hers. Which ideas originated from her as a mortal woman, and which thoughts came from…that _other_ part. She had forgotten what it felt like to _be_ a mortal woman.

Flemeth. It wasn't her true name, but it was the name that identified most with. Or rather, it was the name with which she most allowed others to address her. When one lives as long as she, they lose the use for names, and family, and things of the like. Such luxuries make passing a short life simpler, but utilizing a long one much, much more complicated. That said, of all the names that could have stuck, it had to be the one that sounded like a smelling breed of fish. She no longer knew who Flemeth had been, or how she had been different from another woman, now nameless, who had borne the title Mythal.

 _"_ _She was betrayed as I was betrayed — as the world was betrayed!"_

She heard herself speaking in her mind, though it felt as if the words belonged to another.

"Oh I see. Is that your clever way of telling me that we were never very different to begin with?" She spoke aloud into the still space, her voice low and graveled, another byproduct of her age. This time, however, the only response she got was the resolute breeze. She then added, more softly "Or are you just trying to remind me of my promise?"

It was supposed to have been over with the Inquisitor. He was supposed to have convinced him…

That was what scared her. She had been wrong before, of course, but…it had been some time. And now that that had gone wrong, nothing seemed to want to take shape. Though that of course, could be owed in part to what had gone wrong in and of itself. If the veil itself was under threat, the problem became alarmingly cyclical. Why had she not seen this sooner? Why had she not created contingencies for this very situation? The stone bowl on the table behind her head taunted her at that thought, just there, at the back of her mind. She quietly refused again, but was thus spurred to stand and face the altar again.

Green and black.

This time, she was brought to a place in a very different wilderness. She stood in a dense, semi-tropical jungle. Her first thought was that she was in Qarinus, but upon a second evaluation, she noticed the phenomenal amount of fog (the natural kind) that hung in the air, and guessed Seheron instead. Her ear caught the sound of fighting, and the world swam around her, bringing her to an encampment. The tents were empty, but many of the cages were occupied. Bodies littered the space between the pitched canvas, and blood had saturated the soil and the air. In the center of this macabre scene raged a fight between three people. Two heavily armored men were losing badly to a very unusual elven man. His hair was ashen, he wore no shoes, and his eyes glinted with more than adrenaline. Most unusual, however, were his tattoos. They were not the Vallaslin of the Dalish, instead consisting of a powder blue color, and covering his body rather than his face. The marks ran down his neck, over his arms and hands, his bare feet, and presumably the rest of him, finally coming to a pointed end in the form of a fork on his chin. The armor he wore was also rather odd, as it was not dissimilar to Flemeth's own garb. Grafted with feathered pauldrons, leaving his arms bare. Rather meager defense for a warrior who carried only a claymore. She soon discovered, however, why his dress seemed so cavalier about defense.

He jousted with his opponents in what was apparent to be an ingrained and easy rhythm. They had already lost, he was just waiting for their inevitable misstep. He parried one and kicked him away with a bare foot, sending him flailing into the dirt. He then stepped forward and pirouetted, so that he was now facing the other. His opponent drove his sword toward him, but the elf brought his weapon down upon the enemy's, pinning it under his own. In that moment he dropped the claymore, instead grabbing the sword hand of the enemy. Holding it with strength that his small frame belied, he brought his knee up to meet the elbow of his victim, snapping it in half. The man yowled in pain and stumbled backward, weapon forgotten. The elf picked up his sword again and drove it through the distracted man's neck, then leaving him to bleed out with a savage wrenching of the claymore.

By this time, the other man had recovered himself, but was now more wary of his opponent. He hadn't needed to be, as he was already dead. The elf rushed the man, wrenching his shield from his grasp with a swing of his greatsword. He easily countered the frantic attack from the other hand, knocking the sword from it as he did, and found the man's throat with the hand that didn't grasp his weapon. He throttled him one-handed for a moment before he dropped his claymore from the other hand as well and revealed the ability that made him truly unique as a warrior.

His branding suddenly came to life, each line and curve flaring with a brilliant azure glow. His now free hand faded into a spectral form, becoming translucent in the same blue haze. Looking more bloodthirsty than ever, he plunged his hand into the chest of his victim. It disappeared up to the mid-forearm, straight through the man's breastplate. The man's eyes were wide and filled with terrific horror. His chest heaved, and then, after a sickening jerk of the elf's arm, it stopped, and he was dead on his feet. The elf let the man's corpse fall to the ground, and his hand rematerialized at his side, slick with hot, crimson blood. He had crushed his opponent's still beating heart.

Without bothering to recover himself, he went about searching the dead men's bodies, looking for something in particular. Flemeth, for once, was impressed.

 _"_ _Another wolf…fascinating."_

 _"_ _Not him."_ , she responded, with rather infuriating certainty.

 _"_ _He has potential."_

 _"_ _He has already served his purpose. He may still play a role in things to come, but he is not the one we are looking for."_

The elf had stood, having found what he was looking for. He took a set of keys in the hand that wasn't cascading blood and walked to the cages of terrified innocents. As he began to unlock the first of many, the fascinating elf and the rest of the world around him roiled back into the black mist.

The fog seemed…indecisive this time. It churned this way and that, at times beginning to take a shape, then falling away again, amorphous, as if it had lost the strength to hold itself up. This went on for nearly a minute (though time had little meaning to Flemeth in this place) before it began to swirl around her ferociously, almost angrily, aggressively. It spun and spun, twisting her hair and forcing her to squint against the force. It covered her in darkness.

A moment later she was in the Denerim slums, watching a human girl carry chopped wood inside a house. She watched for a moment as the girl righted herself with a load of wood in her arms, almost dropping a piece but bringing a knee up to stabilize it, and proceeded through the open door of her home.

More than anything else, she was struck by how… _ordinary_ this place was. No one person caught her attention as they went about their lives in a place that was, at the moment, removed from mortal danger. She wondered why she had been brought here, what she was meant to see. She spread her senses and found…nothing. Nothing at all.

She decided she was uncomfortable with this apparition. She willed herself to leave. Nothing happened. The slums chugged on through its day, oblivious to her presence. She willed herself to be free of this forced dream. But yet again, nothing. This alarmed her, so she brought her arms forward and cast a net of magical negation around her, attempting to cut herself free of whatever loop in which she had become ensnared. She focussed, putting her will into the spell, letting her power flow through her, visualizing the wilds.

Nothing came of it. Denerim still stood before her, tauntingly. And Flemeth had run out of ideas. This had never happened before. She had never experienced an augury in which she was not in full control. For the third time that day, she was uncertain of how to proceed. She ran through her list of options again, but came up empty handed just the same. Her mind ran in circles until an idea struck her from somewhere that wasn't herself, mortal or otherwise. She was instructed to try something that she never had before.

She took a step.

The moment her foot touched the hazy dirt, the world shook, as if a great earthquake had begun. Her eyes tore to the sky and she saw that it had become green yet again, but it was the wrong shade. The green of scrying was pale and wretched, the color of a snail crushed under boot. This was a deeper, more powerful veridian green. It was the color of the raw fade.

The sky broke apart, fracturing directly overhead running east-west. As it did so, people began screaming, running for their homes, hoping that the shelter of their walls would protect them from the end of reality. Fire rained from the breach, and suddenly demons were tearing through the streets, killing all who fell beneath their gaze.

She understood suddenly. He wanted to make sure that she saw him, that she knew his mind. Having realized this, the world exploded. Flame consumed her vision.

She was terrified.

Out of the flames came… _a wolf_. It stared at her, silhouetted against the roaring inferno that once was reality. It took a step toward her, snarled and growled…step…step.

Then she was falling. She fell into darkness, hearing the screams of the dying, the shrieks of the demons, and the roar of the flames. She fell into the all consuming blackness. She fell, fell, fell…fell flat on her back in the grass in the Arbor Wilds.

For a moment, she simply lay there, afraid to open her eyes and see a world consumed in flame. Then she heard the wind-in-the-grass-and-in-the-leaves-and-in-the-branches. She opened her eyes.

Standing, she found that she was slick with sweat. She allowed her eyes to rise to the look at the altar, infuriated that she had been invaded in such a way, terrified that it had been possible. In that moment, she felt despair's cold touch begin to claw its way into her thoughts. In that moment, she could not find hope.

 _"_ _No."_

Both parts rang the sentiment in perfect unison. The Maker had plans for this world. She had seen it long ago, but never forgotten. Its time was yet to come, and it had to be defended until it was ready. It was not yet the end.

She raised her head to the sky. "Hear me and hear me well, beast!", she practically screamed, "As I draw breath, you will **_not_** prevail!"

Silence.

For a long moment, she felt ridiculous, an old woman shouting at the sky…

But then a sense hit her. She felt as if she had been heard. As if somewhere far away, he was there, snarling back at her with his lupine fangs bared in rage and spurned hatred. She could feel him loathing her across the mountains and valleys and rivers.

Part of her weeped.

Flemeth was entirely fatigued. Her headache had now settled into a full fledged migraine, and her hunger had begun to ring in pangs. But her resolve had never been stronger.

She approached the altar once more, but this time, her focus was on the stone table. As the sun began to set, her options exhausted, she decided that the stone bowl would taunt her no more. She took up the knife, rolling it in her hand, marveling at its craftsmanship. It was ancient, and yet still as sharp as any steel. She looked down into the stone bowl of water. It felt perversely excited.

She took the very tip of the knife to her left thumb, using just enough force so that it passed through her withered skin, creating a tiny incision. Holding the wounded thumb over the bowl, she permitted a single drop to fall, where it mingled with the water in a wonderful fluid pattern. It had gotten darker now. She turned and strode away from the altar.

Halfway across the clearing, she heard it. The rush of a major flame, like the sound of a pyre. Her mind flashed to her last vision, and the pain in her head redoubled. She pressed her fingers to her temples as her back and the ground around her feet were splashed in a blue-green light emanating from the altar.

 _"_ _Aquamarine"_ , she thought, _"Morrigan's magic had always had the tone to it. Such a lovely hue, aquamarine…"_

Flemeth walked quietly out of the clearing and into the wilds.


End file.
